The intimate character of Boyd Meets Girl’s new album is apparent right from the outset of the first track, their beguiling arrangement of Debussy’s Arabesque No 1. A husband-and-wife cello-and-guitar duo, their mutual understanding is manifest in every bar, not least the way they listen to each other. The intimacy comes from the album’s premise, being ‘conceived, arranged, rehearsed and recorded during the Covid 19 pandemic’, and one can easily imagine them playing these pieces for their own mutual enjoyment in their living room.

Most of the arrangements are theirs, with Debussy, and Florence Price’s sombre The Deserted Garden, rubbing shoulders with some surprising non-classical neighbours: Beyoncé, McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’ and Radiohead. These all work rather well (indeed, ‘Blackbird’ is enchanting), often conjuring quite different characters from the originals. By contrast, those by other hands – Napoléon Coste’s wonderfully evocative version of Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and Valter Dešpalj’s of Boccherini’s delightful A major Cello Sonata – are unobtrusive, staying close to the source works. In between lies Robert Beaser’s Mountain Songs, four arrangements-cum-fantasias (listen to the driving guitar part in the second, ‘The House Carpenter’) on American folk songs – here comes the despair of the album’s title – or ‘Louange à l’éternité de Jésus’ from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which concludes the programme in an emotional state quite other from the one it started with.

The two wholly original pieces are even more fascinating, bringing forwards composers to a wider public most likely unaware of either or the geography linking them. Paul Brantley’s Filles de l’Élysée is a delightful duet written as a birthday present, based at a few removes on the ‘Ode to Joy’ and celebrating a walk down the iconic Paris boulevard with two sisters: ‘Tochter aus Elysium’ indeed. Rupert Boyd met Brantley in the Big Apple, which city inspired Marián Budoš’s A New York Minute, which rather curiously brought Villa-Lobos to my mind. Nice sound, if very close-miked.